Obama in Israel: ‘The Holocaust will never happen again’

JERUSALEM — President Barack Obama on Friday pledged that with the “survival” of Israel, “the Holocaust will never happen again.”

“Here on your ancient land, let it be said for all the world to hear,” Obama said at a service held at Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, Yad Vashem. “The state of Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust, but in the survival of a strong Jewish state of Israel the Holocaust will never happen again.”

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Obama’s third day of his trip to Israel got off to a solemn start on Friday with the Yad Vashem trip as well as trips to gravesites of Israeli heroes.

The trip to Yad Vashem included a memorial service, during which Obama donned a light-colored yarmulke. As a children’s choir sang, Obama, who was accompanied on Friday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli President Shimon Peres, rekindled the flame at the museum’s memorial site, dedicated to the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust. The flame burns next to a slab of white stone, under which are placed ashes from some of the concentration camps, according to the media pool report.

“Our sons and daughters are not born to hate,” the president said in remarks delivered there, according to pool reports. “They are taught to hate. Let us fill their young hearts with the same understanding and compassion that we hope others have for us.”

Obama said he has seen concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto, but “nothing equals the wrenching power of this sacred place, where the totality of the Shoah” — the Hebrew term for the Holocaust — “is told. We could come here a thousand times, and each time our hearts would break.”

Obama began the day by paying his respects at the gravesite of Theodore Herzl, a founder of modern Zionism. Joined by Netanyahu and Peres, he stood with clasped hands before the granite slab memorializing Herzl.

“By laying a wreath at Herzl’s grave just now — an act that other foreign leaders have refused to do — President Obama was reaffirming Zionism and the idea of a Jewish state,” Amb. Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told Ha’aretz.

A pool report said that according to an Israeli official, the trip to Herzl’s grave was “the first thing the Israelis asked for as the trip was being planned.”

“It is humbling and inspiring to visit and remember the visionary who began the remarkable establishment of the State of Israel,” Obama wrote in a guest book at the gravesite, according to the Times of Israel. “May our two countries possess the same vision and will to secure peace and prosperity for future generations.”

Next, he visited the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who was assassinated in the early 1990s just as a peace deal with Palestinians seemed to be in reach.

“[A] remarkable man,” Obama told Dalya Rabin-Pellosof, Rabin’s daughter as he shook hands and talked with Rabin’s children, grandchildren and other family members. The Times of Israel reported “laughter, hugs and handshakes” unfolding during that conversation.

Obama laid stones, as is Jewish custom, at the graves of both Herzl and Rabin. For Rabin’s grave, the stone came from the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, the reports said.

Obama had a private lunch with Netanyahu at the King David Hotel before heading to Bethlehem. He traveled to the West Bank town in a motorcade, rather than on Marine One due to weather. The AFP reported that Jerusalem was hit by a “fierce sandstorm” that derailed the original travel plans, citing Israeli police.